Losing my Voice

The people in my life know I rarely get sick. I do try to live a healthy lifestyle: I generally favor healthy food options, stay moderately active, keep aware of sources of contagion without being overly cautious of them. (Your body can't learn to fight germs, after all, if it never meets any.) All this helps to ward against what's going around, but I don't think I have any kind of super immunity.

The truth is I'm just stubborn. Colds come my way from time to time, and I just refuse to let them stop me. There's work to be done, and people depending on me. If I refused to get out of bed each time I had a stuffy nose, or a little pain, or I just didn't feel right, I would spend most of my life under the covers.

So, sniffles don't slow me down, and I suffer headaches without aspirin. In general, I'll let the pain deliver its message, weigh it, and decide to go on if I'm doing no further damage. As long as I'm not making it worse or risking spreading it around, it's business as usual.

So, when there is something to hinder my usual routine, I stop and take note. Most often, I'll grumble. I'll wait impatiently for the malady to pass, all the while obsessing about what's not getting done. I'm not good at being sick.

But a philosophical nature also forces me not only to endure the experience, but to ask what I can learn from it. Whether or not you believe the Universe or whoever is in charge uses such events to send you messages, there's no denying you have plenty of time for introspection. So, you take the opportunity that comes your way.

Some years ago, a scratchy throat had turned for the worse, and suddenly, I found myself without a voice. I could manage a breathy whisper if I tried shouting, but speech in any normal fashion was impossible. My ears, too, were suffering, muting most of the world around me, leaving me isolated, under water, incapable of easy communication. Since my job at the time was at a public desk, answering phones and trying to solve problems for library patrons, I was forced to take a few days off to anxiously wait for my voice to return.

Communication is what keeps us up in the web of the world, and its absence is keenly felt, even by the quietest among us. Humans are social animals. Though I could never be called chatty, the loss of my voice was a constant burden. Simply not having that power, should I choose to use it, made me uneasy, and the thought of it kept me reaching out to ensure that connections were not lost.

And that, I suppose, is the lesson at the core of the experience: When you're sick enough to stop your routine, maybe the Universe is reminding you to slow down and take care of yourself. When the Universe takes away your voice, She's asking you to be quiet and listen. When you lose your ears too, you're invited to explore and appreciate all the ways you communicate.

Recently, I've been dealing with sickness of another kind. Shortly after my last post, our home computer started showing symptoms of infection. Pop-ups and adware warnings started appearing like a rash in each internet session, a modern day pox that threatens every computer from time to time. It's the sort of thing that's easily cleared up with a little cleaning provided it doesn't hide itself too well among the other files. This time around, though, it's entwined a little more firmly than usual, and my husband (who has taken on computer maintenance as one of his household duties) hasn't had the spare time to untangle the mess. We have been simply doing without that convenience for a while.

Here I am, voiceless again. I continue to express myself and to communicate in other modes: face to face, through phone, written letters and audiocassette, but it feels like some strands of the web holding me up in the world have been cut. I've managed to check my e-mail occasionally by coming into the library in my off-hours, but there has not been the steady comfort of communication that there once was.

To those of us who spent the early part of our lives without personal computers, it may be tempting to think of this sort of communication as false. We may consider e-mail, facebook postings, chat, blogs or discussion boards to be lesser brethren to the "real" interactions in our lives, but in truth, they are only different. Forms of communication are what you make of them, and each way that we reach out to the world is significant in its own way. We may perceive that we are interacting with a machine when we use a computer, but there are real people on the other side of those communications as well. I wonder if early telephone users harbored similar prejudices.

My computer has made it easy for me to maintain connections to distant friends and relatives, to meet extraordinary people I may never have encountered by conventional means, and to express and explore communications in art. So, this period of silence has brought a halt to what has become a valuable, if overlooked, part of my usual routine. It has forced me to apply the lessons of illness to computer illness as well:

Slow down and take care of yourself (and your computer.)

Listen.

Value your connections and your communications.

Now, I am merely patiently (or not so patiently) awaiting the return of my voice.

This post was written, on paper, during our computer's quarantine. Now, thanks to a friend's kindness and expertise, I am reconnected and can speak once more.